Word: aided
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...laughs uncomfortably and scans the teeming plain. More than 2,000 residents of this parish, Lokali, have come to collect food aid on a hot Saturday in May, and though the crowds have dwindled as the sun sinks and people drag or carry home their sacks - a month's ration of mostly corn, with some beans - many recipients remain. They stand or sit in groups, waiting for food if they haven't yet been called, and arguing over how to divide the rations they've received. At the center with the food stash, police clutch assault rifles to scare...
Extreme hunger, and the scenes of desperation it causes, is shockingly common. WFP, the U.N. food-aid agency, reaches more people than any other humanitarian organization in the world. It plans this year to feed about 90 million in 78 countries; almost all of the recipients hover on the brink of starvation. Here in Karamoja, in Uganda's semi-arid northeast corner, food distribution is now a daily ritual. In its 45-year history, WFP has handled war, famine and just about every other kind of disaster, natural or made by man. But Karamoja is pretty typical. After years...
...less, like the people of Karamoja, are simply cutting out meals. Men and women say they were eating at most once a day before WFP came with its meager rations. "We've just been surviving selling firewood and burning [wood to make] charcoal," says Cecelia Amaitukei, a Lokali food-aid recipient...
Sitting at his desk in Kampala, Uganda Country Office Director Tesema Negash rattles through the groups that make up the roughly 2 million WFP-aid recipients in the country. There are more than 170,000 refugees from neighboring countries, and nearly 1 million who have been "internally displaced" in northern Uganda by a long-running guerrilla war. Then there are the residents of drought-stricken Karamoja, as well as pregnant and nursing mothers and HIV/AIDS patients. A ballooning food budget, coupled with the off-again, on-again nature of donor funding, have threatened nearly every Uganda program at some point...
...Uncertainty Principle In some ways WFP is more like a global shipping company than an aid agency. Every Monday through Friday - weekends too if there's an emergency - empty trucks pull up at the warehouse in Kampala, bound for destinations around Uganda and neighboring countries. Nearly 200 porters jog around the warehouse, a steady stream of men carrying 100-lb (50 kg) bags of food on their heads. Trains and trucks arrive full from local traders and from the port city of Mombasa, Kenya, where ships bring donated food from the U.S. and other Western countries. (About two-thirds...